


Crane Rising

by Vera (Vera_DragonMuse)



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-07
Updated: 2006-02-07
Packaged: 2017-10-07 02:19:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/60339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vera_DragonMuse/pseuds/Vera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The rise of a young farm boy to supervillian.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crane Rising

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: This fic does not contain explicit rape, but there is a great deal of manipulation that might make what looks like willing consent dubious.

Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.  
-Hannah Arendt

To suffering there is a limit; to fearing, none.  
-Francis Bacon

The farm he grew up on was the farthest thing from the urban sprawl of Gotham a place could be. Fifty acres of corn, wheat and a small apple orchard provided the Crane family with their living for five more generations then the Waynes had lived in their great manor.

Not that Jonathan knew anything about the Waynes back then. He'd never left Rolling Hills county, closed in as it was on all sides by mountains. The town he and his mother would travel to in a beat up pickup truck ten years away from red was little more then a collection of dilapidated buildings. The Depression had never left Rolling Hills, it's lingering claw marks in the cardboard patched windows and red nosed citizens.

The winters were fierce.

Jonathan, like Bruce Wayne, was the last of a long line of well-known men. Well known being relative to the area. Seventy-five years ago his great-great grandfather had gone mad and killed his wife and three of their children right there on the farm. It had been the middle of particularly harsh winter that blew sharp gusts of wind through the clapboard house, causing a nearly continuous whistling sound.

The noise could drive anyone to insanity, Jonathan believed. He too, the descendant of the child that had survived that gruesome night, had lain awake in the middle of a blizzard unable to block out the noise that drove constantly and without mercy against the house.

It reminded him of his father whistling as he came up the driveway. The traveling salesman brought with him the dust of the road on his long jacket and presents for his son and wife. They greeted him like a hero returning from war each time and for the precious few weeks of the year he lingered, Jonathan and his mother set aside their ongoing struggles to join forces in making their home the most welcoming place in the world. Foods that never graced their table became abundant, fresh linens appeared on every bed and everything was brighter as his road tired parent refreshed himself in their pleasant home.

It was a complete fiction of course and Jonathan, not John and never Johnny, bristled under the fallacy as much as he basked in it. The moment his father was back on the road it would return to the cold kitchen that saw him warming cans of food since he was old enough to reach the stove and trying to cajole his mother to eat something until she threw a shoe or knick knack at him. He never bothered changing the sheets in typical boyish fashion. House keeping bored him overall. Since his mother spent her time spaced in front of her programs, rising only to dole out cash to the farm hands once a month, most of it was left undone.

Jonathan hid away when the workers came to the door, burly men with loud voices, few teeth and rough hands. His mother was at ease with them, if she could ever be said to be at ease with anyone. She sassed them when they were too crude, sent them on their way with a memory of a thin, pale woman with a tongue sharper then her kitchen knives.

Had he loved her once? One evening after retreating from her nightly rage, he observed her from a doorway instead of going upstairs as was his habit. Anger had flushed her usually wane cheeks and her chest heaved with effort. Her eyes were the same ice blue as his as they darted around the room nervous and displeased. Muttering and shaking with the remains of her rage, she eased herself down on the couch as if it might jump up to bite her.

There had been a time that she would take him in her lap after she had hit him and apologize over and over again, stroking his hair and cry a wet spot onto his shirt. But he was too old for that now. Nearly twelve. Nearly a man.

That was the same year that he discovered the library.

School had once been a welcome relief during the year though he didn't exactly like it. Too thin, too tale, too strange and eyes far too sharp, the other children shied away from him. Their taunts bounced off him, skin toughened by years of his mother's night time fits. Physical fights scared him more and the boys sensed it, roughing him up constantly, setting him up for the fall with their insipid girlfriends and laughing as he stumbled over his words when a girl writhed against him. Then beating him up for his imagined attempts at seduction.

Fear was his constant companion. It kept him slender as his mother, even as he grew impossibly taller, limbs hanging too long for his weight. He feared the dark nights, the whistling winds, the fire in the kitchen, his mother pacing in the other room her shadow a flicker on the walls. The boys and girls of school who were growing in ways he didn't understand and had staked him out as an excellent target. He hated how wildly unpredictable they were, first kind then cruel then utterly indifferent. It was a world full of mothers, razor thin and wild.

But more then anything he was terrified of the lingering shade of his great -great grandfather that stalked just out of sight through the farm.

The very thought of the man roaming through tall walls of corn and lingering under the gnarled apple trees sent Jonathan's heart racing. Naturally, living on a farm there was the omnipresent scarecrow that hung distressingly life like in different parts of the field depending on the season. If he glanced out the window too quickly, he could spend the rest of the night curled up in his bed, furious with himself for being so easily set to the brink.

The only time he didn't fear the shade was when his father was home.

It was fear that forced him to the library. Walking out of school on a winter's afternoon, the shadows were falling thick and he knew it would take him an hour at least to walk home. He contemplated going back into the school and sleeping in one of the closets. He had done it before and his mother wouldn't even miss him.

Weighing his options, he didn't realize he'd wandered nearly halfway into town already. That was when he heard it...the whistling of the wind. Tiny hairs rose on the back of his neck, and his stomach went bad, gurgling acid. With the blind terror of a child half his age, he stumbled into the first doorway he could find. A musty scent rose up to greet him in the dimly lit foyer. Tentatively, he moved forward into the single room that housed the Rolling Hills County Library.

There was no librarian behind the desk, there hadn't been to his knowledge in nearly ten years. The town couldn't afford to employ someone to look out for the dingy collection. Instead it was run on the honor system: you were to sign out a book in the ledger and sign it back in within a reasonable amount of time. Once a year someone would volunteer to go through the ledger and double check the collection. They would ride out over the county trying to collect the books back up.

Honor, Jonathan thought bitterly, was sorely lacking in his fellow man. Most of the collection was visibly depleted, clear holes where no books had been present for years. Idly, his fear abating slightly in the reassuringly abandoned room, he ran his finger over crumbling spines. Drawing one out, he moved to a dusty chair and began to read.

For the next two years Jonathan all, but lived in the library. He became a familiar face to the town and many told him he was their unofficial librarian. Indeed, he wouldn't allow for a single one of the beloved volumes to be kept out of his sight for too long and would ride out on his rusting bicycle to farms miles out from his own to collect them. A pallet set up behind the desk served as his bed more nights then not. He plowed through the fiction, hating the trashy romance novels and dime store detective stories that made up the bulk of the collection, but unable to leave them unread.

Despite their flaws and their missing pages, he cherished each one for the temporary peace they provided. Each was an hour at least of relief from his own constantly aggravated system that sent him twitching like a rabbit every time it scented the fox. That was why he braved rain, gunshot and even the cornfields to retrieve each one of them.

On one of these visits one farm's mistress had seen him coming and came out with two plastic bags filled to the brim with books.

"My father liked to read." She drawled softly as she watched him struggle to balance the bike with the extra load. "Good man, but not quite right. Those books have some horrid things in them. Don't you go reading them until you're a good sight older."

It took him four hours to bike back with the bags carefully balanced on the handles of the bike. When he reached the library he meticulously wrote the new books into the ledger and shelved them all. Then he proceeded to read each one of them in alphabetical order. Most were on the same order of the other things he had been reading though with names more famous and recognizable from school texts. And then he reached the F's. There was a lone volume mixed in: The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. As he plowed through it, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was his calling.

Freud was clearly flawed, he thought even as he plowed through the yellowed pages, too simplistic by far. But the ideas were fresh to him and his hard won child's cynicism melted in the face of the psychosexual theories set forth within. The veiled references to the Oedipus complex didn't phase him though the shock of seeing the word 'penis' written out clearly for anyone to see brought a blush to his face even in the privacy of the library at midnight.

Fifteen was more then old enough for him to be aware of the stirrings of his body, but he had always ignored them. There was no one to interest him. Girls were foreign to him and those that sat near him in class smelled too sweet and looked all out of proportion. Boys were forbidden and only in the dark reaches of his mind did he stop to evaluate their physiques. But even if homosexuality were not a cardinal sin to the entirety of Jonathan's cloistered world, he would not have held more then a passing interest in the farmer's sons who populated his life. They made him miserable, ready for him around corners and even ambushing him in his own backyard. The library was his only sanctuary. He kept that way by the ancient rifle he kept under his desk and brandished at any who dared to enter.

Guns, he learned very early, trumped every kind of fist and knife. The fear knuckles and blades could bring was nothing compared to the massive power of a firearm. Muscular boys would cower before his thin frame when he took out the gun. He spent nearly as much time trying to obtain a smaller one as he did reading.

He started to observe the people around him in the same way he had always watched his mother, trying to gauge her whirlwind moods. It gave him a great sense of calm to put words to their actions, find formulas and movements. They were not so random and unpredictable.

Soon he was writing his own small articles, little more then journal entries, in his neat cramped handwriting. Five hundred word treaties on the grocer's obsessive counting and his classmates' frenetic mating rites. His spying only got him in more trouble, of course, beatings for staring too long, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But he would go back to the library to nurse his wounds and write write write....

At sixteen, he was already a budding psychologist. When his father came home that year, Jonathan did not run to the whistling figure, but watched with detached amusement as his mother presented her smiling, made up face to the stranger she professed to love. After they'd made their usual clumsy excuses to him and stumbled upstairs, he went to the huge overcoat and drew out his father's wallet.

It was overflowing with pictures. Pictures of women, pictures of children. Posed against a series of backgrounds, different houses in very different climates. A palm tree here, a cactus there and even their own icy farm with Jonathan sitting at awkward six on his mother's lap, even then looking like he might crush her frail frame.

The anger that took hold of him was a cold kind, frightening him with its chilly intensity. Fear he knew well, contentment on occasion and even anger, but nothing like this horrid choking rage. He wondered if this was how his mother felt when she tossed plates of cooling beans at his head. A part of him desperately wanted to tear the photos to pieces, run up the stairs and grab his rifle, barge into the bedroom they were coupling in and kill the both of them. Him for his betrayal and her for her stupidity.

All the remains of sympathy he had harbored for her fell away. How could she be so easily duped? When his father blew in like wind, whistling and dissolving again with melted snow? Hands shaking, he started to stuff the photos back into their glossy packets (stupid again to keep them in such an obvious place, a small miracle they'd never been discovered) when one turned over and he saw the neat writing on the back.

A name, an address and a few cryptic words: bananas, Florida vacation, broken faucet, dieting b: 7/10 a: 8/9.

They were notes, he realized in sick dread. Notes on each of his women and children, so that he would recall what they liked from year to year, not jumble them up. It was the kind of organization Jonathan used. Unable to stop himself, he turned over the photo of himself and his mother.

Princess, white wines, morning person, mood swings b: 3/12. (His mother sketched in so few words. Their starkness saying more about the man who wrote them then the woman they described.)

reads a lot, hates sports, afraid of scarecrows.

It was so absurd that Jonathan had to laugh. Scarecrows were nothing, but stuffed people. How little his father knew him to get even this basic thing wrong. Jonathan had tried many times to explain about his murderous ancestor stalking through the fields when his night terrors brought his father into the room. Only the same warped projection that was revealed in his mother's description could explain the misreading of those shaky, but accurate stories gasped in the dark of the night.

Motivated by something outside of himself, Jonathan ran up the stairs and took the notebook that he usually kept his observations in and turned to a fresh page. Delicately he wrote down all the information on the back of every photo. Six women in all and 13 children, birthdates all lined up neatly. It appeared he was the youngest. The last and most frail as though his father's seed had barely managed to cough him up after it's long tour of the nation.

He made three copies of the list and waited until his father was relaxing after a big dinner and his mother was humming over the sink. The sight was so bizarre that he was almost happy to sneak away and stand next to the man that had sired him on a crazy woman and then left him to fend for himself.

"Hello, Johnny boy."

"Jonathan." He insisted.

"Of course, of course." Slicked back brown hair and warm brown eyes swam wavered under his intense scrutiny. "Aren't you going to give your old man a hug?"

"I want to go to college." He said slowly.

"Aren't you a bit young for that?" The chuckle was familiar, the same one he used every time Mother suggested he stay a few more days.

"I'll be sixteen next month. That leaves only two years from now. But I want to make it clear now that I'm going."

"Now, Johnny, " Ah, the man-to-man tone. We'll talk through this like adults, just you and me. "You know your mother and I don't have that kind of money."

"You'll find it." Remembering how most shied away from his intense blue glare even as they pummeled him, Jonathan settled it on his father's face. It was pleasing how the man squirmed. "Or there will be consequences."

"Are you threatening me?" The snort of disbelief stoked the boy's rage.

"It is not a threat. I will call every one of your women and tell them just what kind of scam you're pulling." Thick black plastic glasses came off his nose, so he could use the full power of his scrutiny. He cleaned the glass idly on his shirt.

"How did you..." His father hissed, "you looked through my wallet! I ought to tan your hide!"

"If it will make you feel better about your own sins, you are free to take them out on my flesh, but I think you'll find yourself unsatisfied. And in the end the consequences will be the same. I will inform those women, including Mother, what you've been up to all these years."

He's not sure where the calm comes from, but it felt good to deliver those lines in an even firm tone. For once, he didn't feel twitchy or on edge. Dispassionately, he cut a deal for his future. He secured his college education, including room and board. There was a ticket out.

Of course, it didn't feel quite real until he was holding his acceptance letter to Gotham University in hand. Better then any hasty attendance to Sunday church; the thick paper with its regal looking letterhead was an absolution.

Not a minute too soon either. Pushed beyond endurance, he decided to exact his revenge on those who had tormented him. It had been, in retrospect, a vastly stupid idea.

"What the fuck is that?" Growled Vincent as he walked out of the crowded gymnasium, Alysha on his arm.

King and Queen of the Prom, King and Queen of his personal hell. Vincent and Alysha about to be married, Vincent and Alysha who everyone adored. Alysha who whispered sweet words in Jonathon's ear then laughed as Vincent held him down and tore into him.

Vincent and Alysha who were doomed that night.

"It's nothing." She giggled and dragged him to his car. He slid into the driver's seat, waiting for her to settle before slinging an arm around her shoulders.

"Are you sure your parents aren't home?" He started to pull out of the spot, craning to look over his shoulder.

"After the last time? I triple checked." She kissed him on the cheek, her hair falling in his eyes.

So really, it wasn't his fault what happened next. If she had been letting him drive unobstructed then none of it would have happened.

A lark, really. To pick up his gun, his shiny new gun that fit perfectly in his hand. The costume was to keep his identify a secret; nothing was to jeopardize his escape from the dying hamlet. He picked the simple attire of a scarecrow because it pleased his sense of skewed justice that the image others thought he feared should cower those who truly did make him shiver.

Also it was dead easy to make and he wasn't exactly a master sewer.

The plan was simple. He would jump out at several of the local bullies, brandishing his gun and cackling manically. They would scare easily; he would feel better and leave the county not feeling like a complete failure.

Instead, when he appeared in their rear view mirror, it was only out of the corner of Vincent's eyes. His former tormentor screamed, though it was never clear if it was the gun or fleeting glimpse of the costume that so frightened him. But he sped forward, plunging into another oncoming car.

Vincent and Alysha. Vincent paralyzed for life, Alysha dead. He supposed he should feel guilty, but all he could feel was the vicious satisfaction as he watched his old nemesis wheel past the library looking bereft. It was like getting back everything Vincent had ripped from him. It felt like being free of fear.

His father never did come back. The money for school was deposited in an account Jonathan had set up for himself in Gotham via phone. He watched his mother crumble in on herself as the time for the yearly visit came and went twice with not even a phone call. The vivacious anger left her, leaving only a depressed shell. She didn't even pay the farm hands anymore, leaving the job to an increasingly impatient Jonathan.

"You can't leave me." She sniffled once when he sharply slammed down her breakfast and commanded her to eat. With his newfound ability to manipulate using only his eyes and calm voice, he forced food down her throat at least twice a day.

"I can." He informed her brusquely. "And I will."

"What will I do without you?" Her eyes blurred with tears. "Why are you abandoning me?"

He refused to admit how much the words got to him. As he packed his few belongings, they rattled around his mind. For a few moments, he nearly resolved not to go. Leaving her here would be akin to killing her. Alone in her pain, she would never eat, never do anything for herself. But he quickly shook it off, trying to picture a future that consisted of being in this house, borderlining the mystery world of the cornfield. A servant to a mad woman.

Instead, he called an operator.

"How may I direct your call?" Her syllables clipped and hurried like all that he had spoken to in the city.

"I need a rest home for the mildly disturbed."

"There are several in the city, sir."

"The cheapest one."

She connected him with Lowlands Home. The price staggered him, but he was assured that it was well below the normal fee. Unsettled and still torn, he made an appointment. In the morning, the red pick up truck was filled not only with his trunk, but several musty suitcases he had dug up from the attic and filled with his mother's things. It had been strange going through her drawers while she slept. Clothing she had not worn in at least a decade spilled forth, scanty tops and tight jeans.

"I won't leave! This is where my family has always lived." She protested as he pushed her towards the idling truck.

"This is a dead end." He snapped.

"The past will never leave you!" She screamed at him, showing the first sign of her old rage in a long time. "Your roots are here!"

He looked at the decrepit house and the sloppy fields. Land soaked in the blood of the people who sheltered in it. Land filled with the stench of rot. As they drove away, her screaming disintegrating back to nonsensical mutterings, he could feel those roots she spoke of fall away, soft with age and old pain.

The farther they drove, the further removed he felt as if the physical distance was peeling back the layers of pain and fevered panic that had been his constant companion through childhood.

Gotham as it dawned over the horizon should have intimated him. He'd read many books about the small town boy being awed and cowed by the city, swallowed up by it and regurgitated afterwards a slick character jaded and faded or dead.

Jonathan took to it like duck to water. He loved the giant buildings, their facades glassy and glittering in the setting sun. His mother shrank in the sight of the behemoths, twitching every time a horn blasted. He pulled into a dark parking garage and took up her suitcases.

The sanitarium was clean and hideous. It was a hotel once, but the opulence has been stripped away and dribbling patients sat in the yellow living room watching television. As isolated as Jonathan has been, he can guess that these people are probably far overmedicated to compensate for not enough nursing staff.

The chief doctor turned out to be a nice enough gentleman, too old for the job really and frail.

"Mr. Crane, a pleasure." His smile was genuine as he turned his attention on his mother. "And Mrs. Crane, welcome. Why don't you come and speak with me for a while so your son can refresh himself."

He pointed Jonathan towards a bathroom. It was clearly the guest bathroom, almost too clean and under used. As he washed his face, Jonathan stared deeply into his own eyes, searching for something. He wasn't sure how much time passed, but when he emerged the nurse looked at him oddly and pointed him towards some uncomfortable plastic chairs. He glanced through an outdated magazine that was trying to sell pottery. Eventually the doctor emerged, rubbing his baldpate.

"From what I can tell your mother suffers from clinical depression." He said softly, as if breaking terrible news. "She may also be a borderline personality."

The first was of no surprise to him, but the second he'd never heard of.

"A what?" He never thought of his mother being on any kind of borderline. She was always firm on where she stood on all issues.

"Nothing to worry yourself about. She'll be in good hands here."

"There is a small matter..." He paused, deeply ashamed of his own poverty, but he knew he would be worse off if he said nothing.

"We cannot allow anyone to stay with us for free." The doctor said firmly, for what must have been the seventh time at least today.

"Of course not!" Jonathan stared at him, deeply offended. "I was going to ask if there was a job you knew of in the area. I'm new to the city and I'm not sure where to begin."

"Oh...well." The doctor paused, accessing the teenager before him.

At eighteen, Jonathon looked sixteen. He had never quite filled out, his face was clear and lean and his black hair feel in crisp waves around his face. Only those chilly blue eyes marked his age and set people ill at ease.

"We do have a janitorial position open here." It was something in the eyes the doctor thought later that had made him confess the position.

Cleaning up after the zombies that inhabited Lowlands taught Jonathon more about psychology then any class he took at Gotham University. Watching them amble to and fro, his own mother decaying into another faceless green robed body, held more subtle lessons in it then any textbook.

He studied hard in between moping up vomit and blood. Poured over texts and played back lectures until he knew every bit of material by heart. He made no friends, went to no parties. Polite, but stand offish, he encouraged no friendly chatter. Taking his meals in the vast library, hiding with a sandwich and soda in a dark corner, he gave himself an hour a day to read something not being taught in class.

It was chemistry and psychology that gripped him, two subjects that had long been parted and were only now being married, as they should be. The long columns of perfect equations as applied to the seemingly irrational behavior of mankind. He blew through the rest of Freud's works, took up Jung and Gardener, Kinsey and Hull, Adler and Erikson. He learned about personalities, IQ, childhood behavior disorders, the collective unconscious, the awesome power of the ego, the dark secrets of the mind gone wrong and phobias.

It was the last that interested him the most. The nights with one nurse on duty and him with the run of the place saw him starting his own experiments. Small things at first, jumping out from behind corners, whispering from outside of rooms and feeding them easily obtained chemicals. His notebook grew fat.

"I'm going to help people." He told his mother after he finished his rounds one night.

"You?" She cackled, startling him. It was more emotion then she'd showed in months. Reaching out like a blind woman, she patted him gently on the hand. "What do you care for others?"

"I do." He tried for the forceful tone that always cowed her, but she continued to laugh.

"You've never done anything for anyone, but yourself."

He thought of all the long nights preparing meals for her, cajoling her to eat them. The days spent trying to keep up the house so she wouldn't attract any unwarranted attention from the occasional visitor. He thought of their collaborations against his father...but she was right. It was all for him. To protect himself. If there had been a way to get rid of her without ill consequences...

But he had to believe that he was going to do some good. He was going to change things. No one should have to grow up with a mother who turned into a monster, a father who's insatiable need to be loved had him creating families wherever he went like a demented Johnny Appleseed. No one had to live with the terror that even now would swoop on him suddenly, quickening his breath and raising the hair all over his body.

With that in mind, he worked hard in his Abnormal Psychology class and won an internship at Gotham's most notorious institution: Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane.

Arkham had had three guard murders in the last seven years and several inmates had turned on each other in a riot only two years before. They made the Lowlands look full staffed. A lone, untested undergraduate student should have been stuck to paperwork and making coffee. Instead, he did everything the psychiatrists did with the strict warning that he would be doing it all without official approval.

That suited him just fine.

There he became a true student of the horrors the human mind could wreck on itself. For long hours, he would sit with those who had suffered psychotic breaks, men who had taken lives without remorse, raped and molested children. Although all who could still interview coherently claimed innocence, Jonathan had no doubt that everyone of them was guilty.

There was one man, Henry, who had murdered his wife and her lover in cold blood and had been found hunched over the bodies still yelling obscenities at the corpses. The 'trauma' of this event had triggered a complete psychotic break and from day to day Henry denied any knowledge of his wife's death, ranting and railing in his cell that a horrid mistake had been made. That his wife was not even dead and they were making up the whole thing to torture him. The screams bothered Jonathan.

Getting the photos of the crime scene hadn't been easy, they'd been locked up fairly tight, but it had been surprisingly easy to permanently affix them to the walls of Henry's cell. It cured the screaming, but Henry managed to kill himself a few days later. It was the first person Jonathan drove to suicide and it only upset him that it hadn't been planned. Doing the world a favor, really, getting rid of someone like that.

He was sure that no one in Arkham was innocent. If there were innocent people anywhere at all. The more he learned about the human mind, the more muck and darkness he discovered.

Until he met David.

Everything...everything was marked his life from that point. Before David, there was a sweet sort of innocence even in his emerging disturbing tendencies. The death of Alysha hadn't really touched him, a step removed as it was from being his own hand. He'd never had a friend, let alone a lover and he was content with that. People hurt you and he wasn't interested in being hurt anymore.

Isolated and barely present in his own body, Jonathan looked out on the word from behind steel rimmed glasses marking notes down in his ever present notebooks.

And then there was David.

"Mr. Crane!" Boomed out the head psychologist at Arkham one afternoon. "I've an intake evaluation for you. He'll be staying with us while he waits for his trial."

He paused, looking up from the contorted face of inmate 642. Jonathan had been in the middle of some creative therapy, but was able to hide away the vial and syringe, before his supervisor got to close.

"What is he accused of?"

"Murdering his mother. Tortured her to death." The ubiquitous clipboard emerged. "History of depression and two suicidal gestures. Several screaming fights reported coming from their house. His sister, Amanda Wellington, went missing two years ago. Probably offed her too."

The interview was in an unforgiving white room. The man who sat in the stainless steel chair opposite him looked like a boy. The chart read 21, only a year younger then Jonathan himself, but David always looked like a teenager and small one at that. His eyes were a tentative swirl of green and brown and long brown hair fell over a softly rounded face.

"Good morning, Mr. Wellington." He smiled his 'put them at ease' smile.

"I'm David." He insisted in soft, sliding syllables. David's words never seemed to come out the way other people did. They were chopped up and slid against each other in odd ways. "And I didn't do it."

"I'm sure you didn't, David. I'm Mr. Crane."

"I wanted to tell you first off." David ploughed on as if Jonathon had said nothing. "You probably won't believe me, but I didn't. My sister killed her, but she made it look like I did it."

"Your sister...hasn't she been missing?"

"My mother kept her locked in closet upstairs. I helped her get out and this is how she repaid me." David's bitterness was very real and Jonathon didn't doubt that the boy bought the whole delusion he was now spinning out.

"Were you afraid of your mother?"

"No. She never hurt me." David never squirmed, nor did he have the overly still affect of some killers. He moved languidly, gesturing with his hand occasionally to make a point. Once and a while he reached for cigarettes that had been confiscated from him.

"It says here you tried to kill yourself."

"Only once. The second time was an accident." He presented his right wrist with a long jagged scar curling up from his wrist, twisting around his arm. "I saw something fly past my window and went to grab it."

"And?" He prompted. David laughed quietly with the well-worn embarrassment of an old story.

"I forgot the window was closed. Put my entire hand through the glass. No one else was home and it wouldn't stop bleeding, so I walked to the emergency room. Same hospital I went to when I'd swallowed the pills a few years earlier. Guess my records and the nature of my injury didn't look too promising together."

"Do you feel depressed right now?"

"My mother's dead, my sister framed me for her murder and I'm stuck in Arkham, I think I can safely say any one would be depressed as hell." It should have sounded mocking, but instead Jonathan felt like he was sharing in the joke. Something about the self-deprecation and curl of his smile.

He never was included in the joke. It turned out to be a startlingly pleasant feeling. He didn't smile back.

"I'm going to put you on some..."

"I have a few prescriptions already. They work pretty good, can't I stay on them?"

He was much more like the patients of Lowlands then the inmates of Arkham. By the time the interview was over, Jonathan was the one shifting in his chair, tapping his pen softly against his bottom lip. David was taken back to his room by one of the orderlies and Jonathan wrote out careful notes. He idly touched the vial in his pocket, but he didn't feel like returning to his latest experiment.

Instead, he went to his desk and sorted through the information he had about David's crime. Finding the address, he decided to look at the crime scene himself. Not examining his own motivations, he took the subway to a mediocre part of town. The building itself was non-descript; the door to David's apartment still barred with police tape, but without anyone to stop him from entering it was easy enough to duck under the tape. The door had been left wide open. Doubtless everything of note had already been stripped away.

Good housekeeping had been at work here. He was surprised to find the place neatly kept, clean and sparkling. There were rows of porcelain dolls on one of the walls and a lace doily on the couch. The cramped kitchen sported plaques that boasted, "Cleanliness is Next to Godliness" and other such niceties. He opened a few doors, not sure what he was looking for.

Bathroom, hall closet...the first bedroom must have been David's, done in blues. There was no initial evidence that it was more then a guest room except a full hamper. It was as if David had been unable to take root there, the quiet nature of his sliding off the walls and being washed away. The work of a very domineering mother, no doubt.

The door at the end of the hallway proved to be the master bedroom. There was blood spatter along one wall and a dark brown stain where the body must have bled out. The report said the woman had been kept alive for hours. He tried to imagine the boy he had seen earlier that day committing such an atrocious crime.

Turning slowly, he saw another door. And heard breathing. Without another thought, he pulled out his cellphone and dialed 9-1-1. In a whisper he informed the operator of his location. He stood stock still after that, not daring to move closer nor leave until he heard the cops pull up outside. It was a tense ten minutes, but as soon as he heard the squeal of their tires he moved forward, throwing open the door.

A young woman, starvation thin and covered in blood leapt out at him, clawing at his face. The officers barged in just in time to pry her off of him and handcuff her. Calmly, he explained that he had come to investigate the crime scene as the suspect's psychologist. They didn't question him any further, taking her away.

He continued to see David throughout the trial. The young man did not have the money to make bail and was considered potentially dangerous. Jonathon spent many hours in session with him, growing to like him more and more.

It was a relatively simple matter to testify after that. It was the first time he would go to court on behalf of a client and he laid down habits that would see him through many years of defending those of questionable sanity.

He wrote careful notes and memorized them the night before, quizzing himself as he drank seltzer to calm his stomach. In the morning, he spent more time then usual with the mirror, hoping to show the world the coolest exterior he could manage.

The trial was a bit of a let down after that. A quick fluttering series of questions from both sides that left him unshaken and cool. The only thing that caused him to waver was the sight of David himself, sitting composed and expressionless next to the slick looking lawyer that had been appointed to him.

He was found innocent. Jonathan smiled at the understatement. The raw untouched personality that rippled under David's placid surface was something deeper then innocence.

"Mr. Crane." The thin rattling voice took him by surprise, as he existed the courthouse.

"David, congratulations."

"Thank you." There was a slight pause and David laughed. "The trouble is, I don't know what to do now."

Jonathan glanced at his watch. He had a lecture at six, but it was only four and David had turned hopeful eyes to him.

"Why don't we have a cup of coffee and talk about it?"

He'd never had coffee with someone else, but he was grateful that the suggestion came off with the ease of someone who said such things all the time.

There was an upscale cafe down the coroner and David drew out a battered billfold and looked at it with something akin to regret.

"I don't have a house. Ours was rented. My mother lived entirely on credit. I've never worked a day in my life." He set the wallet on the table. "I was half hoping they'd find me guilty just so I would have somewhere to go."

"We'll find a place for you." He said firmly, already ticking over possibilities. "Once you've established a residence we can see about getting you a job. It might not be glamorous, but it would be a way to start until you feel ready to get back to school."

"You really think I could go back to school?" He asked wistfully, staring into the murky content of his mug.

"Why wouldn't you? You're certainly intelligent enough and given the right motivation capable of doing the necessary work."

"Mother always said I was too stupid to be taught. That school was a waste of time."

"You're Mother is not a trustworthy observer as I think we've discussed on more then one occasion."

Silence descended for a moment and Jonathon thought about the kinds of places that would take in someone like David. Nothing pleasant was coming to mind. No where that would encourage him to grow instead of a place like the Lowlands that would simply drug him into passive silence. Gotham had grown lazy with helping its lost citizens.

"You know everything about me." Startled, Jonathan nearly dumped coffee into his own lap. "And I don't know anything about you."

"That is how the doctor patient relationship should be."

"Even though I'm not really your patient any more?"

"If I continue to help you then that continues to be our relationship."

"But I can help you too. And if we help each other then we're just friends."

Simplistic logic.

"And how do you propose to help me?"

"You're lonely. It was one of the first things I noticed about you." He forced himself to meet David's evaluating gaze.

He realized suddenly, the reason that he felt so oddly comfortable around his patient. David easily met his gaze, did not drop his eyes or fidget. It wasn't a confrontational stare, but one of easy listening that one might adopt with a friend. It disturbed Jonathan deeply.

"How do you surmise something like that?"

"You were always so eager to talk to me. Like you hadn't spoken to someone your own age in a long time. I remember feeling like that. Isolated. It's terrible."

"I am not lonely."

"Alone then."

He thought about his mother, the other doctors, his fellow students even the roommate they had forced on him sometime in his third year.

"I suppose so."

An image unfolded then, intense and pleasing. Rebuilding his fragile patient from scratch, taking in the young man would go against many of the doctrines being crammed down his throat in school, but so what? He thought most of them were next to worthless any way.

"You may stay with me until such a time that you are able to support yourself." Jonathon released the mug he'd been holding in a death grip, ignoring the fleeting pain his knuckles.

"Thank you." David flashed him a smile and his stomach fluttered nervously.

Having David in his home was both a pleasure and a daily agony. Everything in his life had become neatly automated, a graceful flow of routine that probably boarded on the obsessive. The apartment was barely furnished; he had neither the time nor the money for such luxuries. As soon as David moved in everything shifted. He could not come home and expect to find anything where he had left it in the morning. Trained to be neat by his mother, David hardly left a sprawl behind him, but there were constant signs of his presence. Sneakers lined up by the door, dishes drying in the rack and all sorts of greasy food smells linger in the kitchen.

The pluses of a roommate were terrifyingly easy to list. David meant regular meals without effort as the young man was adept at rudimentary cooking and enjoyed food shopping. There was none of the pressing silence in his apartment. There were always soft breathing sounds, footsteps, the soft hum of the television in the living room...

The agonies were in those same beauties. David filled up the tiny space they shared. Nothing was purely his any more. His clothes, pressed by his own hands the night before, would smell of David's shampoo in the morning. He had no idea how this was possible and even moved his bureau to the other side of the room, farther away from the shower. But the smell lingered, distracting him all day.

And then there was the delicious moment when he came home. David startled so easily and it was wonderful to open the door and see him jump, a hand flying protectively up. The fear melting to a happy smile. Sometimes he wondered what made him feel better, the fear in his eyes or the joy.

"I brought you something." He would usually reply, handing over something small, innocuous. A candy bar, a magazine at first and then as David started leaving the house himself to retrieve such things, more elicit gifts of pills. Trusting or stupid, Jonathan hadn't quite decided, David took everything handed to him. Generally it was something mild, something he'd had before like thorazine or some other anti-psychotic. He would spend the night in a narcotic haze, leaning a bit against Jonathon on the sofa he used as a bed watching the nightly news or listening to some article read out of a psychiatric journal.

"I love the way you talk." He'd muttered once, wiping at his face ineffectually against the drool. "I could listen to you read the phone book."

Not that he needed any of the beauties Jonathan would serve him. Given the chance, David could have rejoined society. It would have been a rocky, painful transition and he would never be normal, but he could have done it. Instead, he went to work during the day at Dunkin' Donuts and spent the nights in one kind of drugged haze or another.

The notebook kept in the locked bedside table labeled 'Experiment Alpha' grew thicker and David started to have odd side effects. When the boy started to hallucinate, Jonathan backed off for a time.

"I brought you something." He proffered a DVD instead of pill that evening and David took it just a gratefully without the slightest sign of distress. Settled against him on the couch, insisting they watched it together. It was no different then a night on pills.

That was when he realized he was in trouble. He had thought it was the pills that David was addicted to, had thought that was what kept the boy tied to him long after he could have supported himself. Instead, it was clear that David was becoming dependant on him.

"You should get your own place." He said over breakfast the next morning.

"Did I do something wrong?" A flash of panic in doe eyes. Jonathan suppressed his excitement.

"Don't you think it's time? You can certainly support yourself."

"But then who would keep you company?" The fork started to vibrate in the slender hand, a flush coming to pale cheeks. Jonathon felt his own breath quicken.

"You shouldn't hold yourself back." In his best detached tone. "The rode to recovery needs to move forward."

"Please." There was a quaver in his voice now. "Please don't do this..."

"Do what? I'm just concerned about you. I don't want you to regress."

"Let me stay...I'll start taking classes! Please, just don't make me leave."

There...just on the verge of a panic attack now. If he pushed him once more, he would need to be sedated. Jonathon drew out the long pause.

"All right. I'm going to go to work. When I come back, I expect to see registration forms filled out. If you're not sure what to take, we can talk about it."

 

The relief in the air was palpable, but Jonathon had his rush. As soon as he got to work, he went to one of the stalls and jerked himself off into a handkerchief, one hand in his mouth to stifle his cries. The bite mark on his hand taunted him for his weakness the rest of the day.

 

David hugged him when he walked in the door.

 

"I went down to the University and they said I'd have to take my SATs again. So I signed up for a refresher course and they registered me to take it in two months which will be just in time for Fall applications." He released him. "Is that all right?"

 

Surprised by the embrace, he only nodded and let David's prattle wash over him. All through dinner he tried to remember the last time anyone had embraced him. Surely his mother had on one his less and less frequent visits? He could no longer recall. It seemed to him no one had touched him in a familiar matter since he was a small child.

 

David touched him a lot after that night.

 

Jonathon got sick of endless movie watching and began to pick up books again, reading allowed to David again. He seemed to enjoy it just as much sober as drugged, sometimes sitting at Jonathon's feet as he read until all unaware, Jonathon would find himself stroking the other boy's hair.

 

Graduation, which he had not even planned to attend, saw him in the ridiculous academic costume while David smiled, took photos and wheeled his barely coherent mother around the auditorium. Jonathon hadn't wanted his mother there, but there was no good way to explain why when David revealed his plan to bring her.

She looked startlingly young in her wheelchair, head nodding against her chest during the longer speeches. Jonathon visited her religiously every other week, always bringing her daises and staying to watch an episode of Jeopardy with her. Usually they did not bother to speak. She because she was fighting against a narcotic haze and he because he had nothing left to say to her. But there, that moment as his name was called and he walked across the stage to take his diploma in one hand and shake a line of idiot bureaucrats with the other....she looked like anyone else's mother. Maybe a little soft around the edges and eyes a little glassy, but she clapped her hands, turned to David and whispered excitedly. When they dropped her back at Lowlands, she had brushed a kiss across his cheek.

"I'm very proud of you." Her voice was distant even though she couldn't be more then an inch from his face. "Hold on to that boy, he's a good one."

The whole ride home he clutched his hands tightly together, fighting back tears that he couldn't explain and counting his breaths until they smoothed out and away from the panic attack he felt descending. Halfway through, David reached over and covered his white knuckles with a gentle hand.

At home, David presented a cake he'd baked himself with sloppy icy lettering: "Congratulations Jonathon' smeared across. He couldn't figure out what all the fuss was about. True he would begin teaching in the fall, but he would also start his doctoral program that would consume several more years of his life.

"It's not about what's to come, it's celebrating the here and now." David informed him as he poured him a glass of the cheap champagne sitting on the coffee table.

 

"I know what I accomplished. There is nothing to fuss over."

 

"Well, I think it's pretty incredible. A double major, magna cum laude? It's great."

They finished the bottle and by the time David leaned forward to kiss him Jonathon had been waiting for it. He expected to be disgusted by the touch, was ready to reject him. There was nothing magical about it or even particularly sexy, he decided, but there was nothing unpleasant either.

David sank to his knees and gave him a sloppy, inexpert blowjob. When he came, it was with a startled cry and for an instant he wasn't in his cool, neat apartment, the walls were white and the quiet hum of Arkham's generator rumbled around him.

His internship ended with his graduation and he had been dreading it. Arkham was his haven, the solid walls and bars a promise of safety and it's inmates offering him complete control over their fragile psyches. When he went in to hand over his security pass the next day, he stood in the doorway of one of the empty cells and closed his eyes. He would be back here one day that much he knew. Even if it was only through David's delicate hands and wet, willing mouth.

Sleeping with someone made him nervous at first. All those thoughts sealed away from him only inches away. Through the night, David would turn, sigh and dream. Always dreaming until Jonathon became nearly sure that they were leaking over into his own. Why else would he start to suddenly see things like deserts and corpses when his own dreams had always been of wheat fields before?

His nerves melted away as he realized how vulnerable David was in his sleep. Deep under, Jonathan could move his pliable limbs, pinch him with gently increasing pressure so he would not wake, only finding odd bruises in the morning. Denied the outlet of Arkham, he returned to experimenting on David. No longer with anti-psychotics, but with fear inducing drugs. Holding the compact body against his as he shook through a panic attack gave him no end of satisfaction.

Despite the crippling panic attacks, David adjusted well to university life. He quit his job at Dunkin' Donuts and started taking martial arts classes. The last of the softness in his face melted away and his body started to tone. Soon he was even making friends, forming a study group that met every Thursday.

Jonathon was sick with jealousy from Wednesday evening to Friday morning just thinking about it. His own classes were going well enough though he seemed to be saddled with an unbearable amount of idiots and his grading curve reflected it. No one complained.

Chopping vegetables on a November evening, he watched the knife cleave the flesh and thought about the knife he'd had when he was ten or so. It was a kitchen knife, nothing special. He'd carried it with him to school every day, reaching in to clutch the handle occasionally when fear would sour his stomach. His transitionary object, laughing without mirth.

"What's so funny?" David slid in behind him, hugging him from behind.

"Transitionary objects." Coolly he slid away from the touch.

"What are those?"

Easily he slipped into a lecture mode as he finished dinner, feeling the jealousy and rage begin in his gut. The idea that tomorrow night, David would be somewhere out of reach, hanging out with other beautiful college boys doing God knew what... it was beginning to taint all their evenings together. He reached absently for the newest concoction he'd been toying with and ground it into the mashed potatoes.

It wasn't until dessert that David started to look pale. Then he started to shake. The effects shouldn't have started that early. And then he ran to the bathroom and started to retch. Concerned, Jonathan kneeled next to him.

"What is it...Jonathon?"

"My stomach...I think food poisoning." He coughed and then was throwing up again. Jonathon held back his hair and tried to ignore his own rising panic. What had he done?

It wasn't until two that David managed to fall asleep and stay there. He'd be throwing up every half hour and his color was bad. At one point, Jonathon was seriously considering the hospital, but David had insisted it was food poisoning and wouldn't hear of it.

Even asleep, David looked ill and Jonathon did not dare court sleep himself. Sitting vigil, fingers wrapped around one wrist to counting out the pulse, he realized that for the first time in his life his mother had give him good advice. He was not going to lose David, especially not through his own incompetence. The very thought of a life without the other man sent him into frenzies, the like of which he hadn't had since he thought he spied his murderous ancestor in the fields.

The next day his color was still bad, but at least he'd stopped throwing up. By the afternoon he was sitting up and kept down some soup. Relieved beyond all reason, Jonathon stayed in bed with him putting up with television shows he hated and waiting on him with slavish devotion.

"Who are you and what did you do with Jonathon?" David laughed when he curled around him and fed him toast.

"I can't take care of you?" He asked stiffly.

"You can! I'm not protesting." Then he groaned. "I totally forgot about my study group. I better call them to cancel."

"No." He rubbed his eyes, but he had made a promise to himself to try harder so... "Have them here."

"Won't that bother you? We'll probably make a lot of noise."

"I think I can handle noise for a few hours."

"Wow, all right, thanks." The television told about a miracle in hair growth. "I'm sorry if I scared you."

"You didn't." He clutched at one thin hand tightly enough to block of blood flow. It clutched back.

The knock at the door woke them both from a nap and David rushed to the bathroom to make himself presentable. Resigned, Jonathon went to the door, prepared to face a pack of fraternity brothers complete with keg if necessary.

"Hullo!" A pink haired gnome beamed up at him. "You must be David's boyfriend! I'm Candy."

"Candy." He repeated, slightly stunned. She pushed past him and spread her books on the kitchen table.

"Well Candace really, but I Iike Candy better. I've seen you around campus before, you a student too?"

"Graduate student." He muttered.

"Where are the others?" Still a little weak, David settled slowly into the chair. Candy tsked.

"They're coming up the stairs. You really need to get a place that has elevators. You look half dead, are you sure you can stand a study session?"

"With the test Milford cooks up?" He snorted. "I better be."

Jonathon retired to the bedroom with a barely uttered excuse. He kept the door cracked open an inch or so, standing so he could see out and they couldn't see in. The whole group except for David was female. None of them were anything like good looking, one girl so morbidly obese that a fragile kitchen chair kept creaking ominously every time she laughed which was often. Another was thinner even than Jonathon with a long beaky nose and the last had such horrible acne that just looking at her was painful.

This was the group that had him near an ulcer for the past three months. Their conversation was mostly about what they were studying. David put on a pot of coffee near the end and when they closed their books they gossiped for a while.

"Do we get to meet that elusive boyfriend of yours now?" The fat girl asked with her noisy laughter.

"Oh, I spotted him. " Candy poured cream into her mug. "Gorgeous. Well a bit on the thin side and too tall for me."

"He isn't too tall." David defended.

"Well maybe not for you honey." She soothed. "But us vertically challenged people have to think about our necks occasionally."

Their conversation turned again and Jonathon closed the door. Listened to them all leave and set aside his book as David came in.

"How do you feel?"

"Better. Tired." Sat on the bed and peeled off his shirt. Jonathon counted his vertebrae, and then leaned over to kiss his neck. Ran hands over his chest and settled on over his heart, feeling it beat restlessly under his fingers.

"I'm sorry."

"For what?" The body turned in his arms.

"Making you sick."

"It's all right. How were you supposed to know? Don't buy the shrimp from that place next time." He kissed him. "You didn't do it on purpose."

He kissed him back, roved hands over him. Thought, no I didn't. Not on purpose, not by accident. Not ever again.

The homeless population was growing, he thought as he drifted off to sleep. No one would care if one or two of them went missing. It was a much safer outlet.

Five Years Later

The house, even further dilapidated from nearly a decade of neglect, reminded him sharply of his mother. It appeared with hapless grass the slight rise. The rusted out pick up truck that had driven away from it was long since in the scrap heap. He returned in compact Japanese import, David in his mother's place in the passenger seat.

The call had come early three days before. Half asleep, he had listened patiently to the doctor explaining in halted words. He'd hung up, turned into the warm body next to him and fallen asleep again. When he woke up and saw the phone off the hook, he finally pieced the words together.

"My mother died." Silence descended after that. Dimly, he was aware of David making phone calls, serving him food.

The funeral had been just the two of them. His mother had never expressed a feeling one way or another on religion, so he threw in a handful of dirt. Felt he should say something, but the words wouldn't come. David must have spoken, definitely cried. The other man had grown to like the frail woman, visited her occasionally on his own. Jonathon wondered if he should be sad or angry. Instead, he feels like a weight has been lifted.

"This is where you grew up?"

The house had been on the market the whole time, of course. Jonathon hadn't cared if he never saw it again. It had never sold. With his mother gone, it came into his hands and he decided to sell the land to developers. Liked the idea of the whole farm being lifted and turned by huge machines and being settled on by a hundred families in uniform condos.

"Born and raised."

"I always imagined it being a little more picturesque."

They got out of the car and stretched. Even in the sunshine the house looked foreboding as though it had sat all these years brooding, ready to seek vengeance on those who had wronged it.

"It's been in my family for ten generations."

David whistled.

"That puts it back before the revolution." He moved forward slowly.

"I'm not sure it's safe to go in."

"It's stood for that long, why would it collapse now?" But there wasn't much confidence in his voice. "Why else come if we're not going to go in?"

"True. Move slowly. At the first sign of anything wrong, get out."

They moved forward together, taking the first ginger steps onto the porch. It was badly rotted in some places, but it held their weight until they entered.

"No one wonder no one ever bought this place. The agent couldn't use a feather duster or something?" David sneezed.

"No one around here will go near the place." He sighed and moved across the living room, leaving behind his huge footprints in the dust. "They think it's haunted."

"Is it?"

Jonathon stopped short at the kitchen doorway, tracing a finger over the gouges in the wood. Places where steak knives and forks had been thrown before he learned to serve things with a spoon.

"I don't believe in ghosts."

"Me either. But this place could sure get me started."

The stairs were in good shape. Stuck in memory, David's presence, in Gotham so familiar and desired, was strange. An irrational part of him worried that the house would taint him somehow that they would bring back the smell of decay with them.

"This was my bedroom." The bed was still made. The dresser still strewn with things he hadn't seen fit to pack. He unfolded the box he had brought with him.

"It's hot up here." The window opened begrudgingly. "That's some view."

He glanced up, saw the familiar expanse of the field. Nearly jumped when a dark shape fluttered among the wild crops.

"It's just a field." More to himself then his companion.

"I meant the mountains."

"Oh...yes." Jonathon moved to his side looking out. The barrier of mountains, physical reminders of his imprisonment here. They had never seemed scenic or beautiful to him then. Nor did they now. He returned to the bureau, opening a few drawers.

"I can see why you were lonely." The cheerful prattle flowed over him, keeping him in the present as he shifted through clothes he hadn't worn in years. Most of it worthless. "It feels like there's no one else around here for miles."

"There isn't." A harsh material caught his fingers. Curious he tugged at it. "The nearest neighbor is four miles over."

"I've always lived right up against other people. Even when I couldn't talk to them, it was comforting."

It was a burlap sack with two holes cut in for eyes and another for a mouth. The mask he had worn the night of the Prom. He clenched it between his fingers.

"How long do you think it takes straw to rot?" He asked, tucking the mask into his pocket.

"I don't know...few years maybe. It's pretty resilient, why?"

The scarecrow shouldn't be there. It should have fallen down a long time ago, picked away at by the elements. And it had to be the scarecrow. No one would come pick around on this property...there was no reason. A wind blew through the eaves, sounding out a long low whistle.

"I want to burn it down."

"The straw?" David was at his side in an instant. "You're shaking."

"The house. I want to burn it down."

"The contractors are going to rip it down next week."

"I want to watch it burn." He drew a pack of matches from his pocket.

"Maybe if we pile up some straw in the living room."

They watched from the road as the house caught ablaze. The fire trucks wouldn't be there for another hour, Jonathon estimated. Someone would have to notice, call in the fire department and the trucks would have to come out all the way from town.

"We should go." He yelled. It was startling how much noise a huge fire made.

Driving away, he kept glancing back, watching the fires grow eating away. Remembered thinking about his roots falling away. That had not been enough. Well, he'd burnt down his whole family tree now. The last remaining Crane who lived in a place where no one knew to be afraid of the name. He had won.

At least so he thought until he started seeing the black figure again. At first it was only in his dreams. The nightmares that he hadn't had since high school returned. David would sleep through them, leaving Jonathon to calm himself in the dark. He decided it was his unconscious' way of dealing with his mother's death.

And then it started appearing in the parking lot outside the lab. He spent a lot of late nights, as was his new privilege as a full-fledged doctor. Parked close to the door and carried a sidearm because you couldn't be too careful in Gotham these days.

Walking back the few feet to his car, he was sure he saw a movement in the dark. Drew his weapon and got into the car. Turning on the headlights, he pulled out sweeping the lot with high beams. There was no one there.

After that, he started to see the figure everywhere. Not just at night, out of the corner of his eye in a grocery store, following him up the stairs to the apartment and once even in the corner of his own bedroom when he stirred from sleep. His fear no longer consumed him, instead he became angry.

At breakfast, David pried from him what he'd seen.

"In our bedroom? Jonathon, you have to call the police. This has gone on long enough."

"No police. I'm going to shoot him the next time I see him. Then we can call the police." Slamming his spoon into the bowl, bran flakes few everywhere.

"Be careful, please. You don't know who it is, they could be dangerous."

"I know he's dangerous. No one safe turns into a stalker. What he doesn't know is that I can be dangerous too." Jonathon bit off. "I'll be home late."

"Fine. If I'm not here when you get back I'm at Candy's."

"Remember we have a lesson at the dojo tomorrow."

David kissed him on the cheek.

"I'll remember. Have a good day, love."

The next time he saw him was in a morgue. Over the years he had seen his fair share of corpses, some dead by his own hands. They meant even less to him then the living, nothing more then meat. Whatever made them human had certainly left the building. Looking at his embalmed mother had actually been embarrassing. The corner had used heavy makeup and dressed her in the only dress she'd owned, red and cut suggestively.

David looked petrified. His eyes had been closed, but they hadn't shut his gaping mouth, or unbent his arms from the protective cross they made across his chest. Dressed in the same clothes he'd worn this morning, they no longer fit him, they had been torn to shreds. His body covered in a thousand small cuts and bruises.

"What happened?" He'd asked thickly, unable to take his eyes from the mouth that had kissed him only that morning.

"He was found in an alley. Been dead about four hours. Whoever did this was a real crazy." He'd told the corner that he was a roommate, knew he'd be more likely to give details that way. Didn't want to be shielded from the facts. "They paralyzed him, tortured him for a while."

"Was he raped?" Touched the cheek delicately. He'd been trying to grow a beard.

"Uhh...." The corner scratched his nose. "You sure you really want to hear this?"

"I need to know." He insisted.

"He was sexually assaulted with a blunt object."

The cop came back in the room. Jonathon struggled to remember his name.

"Enough, Mr. Grant. Get back to work. I'm sorry, Dr. Crane. You shouldn't have had to hear that." He turned. "If you'd come with me."

Gordan, that was it. He followed him to a cramped office.

"Are there any suspects, Officer?"

"We have some ideas. You know his mother was murdered?"

"He was found innocent. It was his sister." He instantly defended. It had been years since anyone remembered.

"I know. And the M.O. on this one is a lot like his mother's death. We think maybe his sister did it."

"His sister is in jail. I helped put her there."

"She wound up in the Joule's House, actually." A medium security insane asylum, Jonathon ground his teeth.

"When did she escape?"

"About three days ago. According to the administration there, David was contacted and warned that his sister was loose. Didn't he mention it to you?"

Cast his mind back over the past three days. He had been consumed by the stalking black figure. Had been so sure it was him it was after. Had David been more jittery then usual? He couldn't remember.

"No. He didn't."

"She's our best suspect at the moment. We'll contact you when we get more information."

Weeks passed and there was no news. Jonathon arranged the funeral, shocked by the number of people who turned out. All the college friends that he had met in drips and drabs over the years were there and some professors too. The master at their dojo, neighbors and even a 'recovered' inmate from Arkham. There were a lot of speeches and a lot of people shook his hand and patted him on the back. Candy was the only one that hugged him, her head resting on his stomach.

"He was a good man. That fucking cunt should hang for what she did."

"Hanging is too good for her." He agreed absently. Behind her, the casket began to descend.

Made it a point not to return to the dojo, moved so he wouldn't have to see the neighbors and ignored Candy and the others when they knocked on his office door. They had never been his friends and he wasn't looking for compassion or pity. In his mind, he had entombed David a part of himself, but apart forever.

In his packed advanced level class on the psychology of fear, he started an unusual syllabus. He used different tactics each week to startle them, strike fear into their hearts. The class became wildly popular until the lecture hall was packed, people sitting on the floor.

The day he drew out his gun and pointed it at them, they were eating out of the palm of his hand.

"Why is it that a gun inspires so much fear?" He grinned at them, friendly. "Because it is a tool that has only one purpose. Knives have a variety of uses, but a gun is one of the few things made by man that exists solely to cause harm.

"It is also immediate. There is no chance of running from a gun. One cannot dodge a bullet, modern movie making aside." A few weak chuckles, but most eyes trained on the barrel of the gun. "The sound of a backfiring tire is enough to send even the strongest man to the ground. Guns are power."

He aimed and fired, relishing the screams from the crowd.

"He shot Janice! That crazy shit shot Janice!"

The young lady in question was sobbing, pressing fingers to her bloody cheek. He had been hit the flowerpot a few feet in front of her, not calculating that that the shard would fly towards the crowd. By the end of the day he was packing up his office. Dimly, he wondered if he could go back to doing janitorial work.

"It is a shame to see such a brilliant mind go to waste over such a senseless accident." The suit was new, expensive and the man in it looked like he could afford a thousand more of them.

"May I help you?"

"You are Dr. Jonathon Crane, are you not?" He crossed and sat in the uncomfortable seat set aside for students. One of Jonathon's little ways to keep them from lingering. "I have an offer for you."

"What kind of an offer?" He continued to pack, not betraying an iota of interest.

"There is a position for a psychopharmacologist opening up at Arkham. If you desire, the job is yours."

"Sir, I know the Warden of Arkham, he is responsible for all hiring and you are not him."

"How long have you lived in Gotham, Dr. Crane?"

"Eleven years."

"Then you should know that everything in this city could be bought. Overlooking previous accusations of prisoner abuse and today's incident wouldn't take much at all."

"What would you want in return?" It was his dream job, far better then teaching indolent children the magic of fear, only to find them interested in cheap tricks.

"Nothing that you would find morally abhorrent. Do you have morals, Dr. Crane?"

"A few." He hadn't thought about it in many years. Picking up a near by pencil, he rolled it between his fingers.

"Well, the job I have for you would cater to your particular skills. They're would be some tangling with law, of course. Nothing you couldn't handle and if you're quick enough will never have any kind of serious problem."

"What else?"

"All I ask is your complete obedience." He smiled paternally at him. Jonathon shuddered. The pencil in hand began to tap, betraying his nerves for the first time since the man had entered.

"And in return, I get Arkham."

"It will be your playground. There is something to sweeten the deal. If we have a bargain, then in about ten minutes your phone will ring. It will be police to inform you that Amanda Wellington is in custody. She will be found guilty and eventually sent to Arkham."

The pencil snapped in half.

"Your wish is my command."

Mrs. Wellington was imprisoned at Arkham a year after the new psychopharmacolgist took up residence. Her trail had dragged on for months and a hundred witnesses were called. Dr. Jonathon Crane was not one of them. No one working there knew about the connection between these two events and no one even asked him a question when they found her in another prisoner's cell. She had been badly tortured and raped with a blunt object. They kept her at the internal hospital, her screams keeping all the other patients awake. Once they got her sedated, she started to throw up and did not stop for hours. She died in the early hours of the morning on the way to Our Lady of Grace Hospital.

The first Jonathon heard of it was at the nurses' station the next evening.

"Just kept screaming. Wasn't like anything I saw her do before though all beat up like that...nearly feel bad for her."

"Only nearly." Another nurse scoffed. "Nasty piece of work that one."

"Funniest thing was what she kept saying. Just kept saying 'Scarecrow' over and over again. Pretty sure she's never been outside of Gotham, where would she have seen one of them?"

"That is a weird one. What do you think it is, Dr. Crane?" They looked up at him.

He leaned in the doorway, listening to the quiet hum of the generators.

"The mind is a mysterious place."

As he walked away, he started to whistle.


End file.
